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Partners
Premonition"I hate surprises," Linda (Bullock) tells her husband Jim (McMahon) in the prologue to Turkish director Mennan Yapo's US debut. Well, should she ever catch this film - and given the skewed logic of the world we're in here, it's not impossible - she'll have nothing to worry about. This predictable, feeble thriller offers nothing in the way of surprise, with the exception that an A-list star like Bullock signed on to make it.
Like the reverse of Tony Scott's 2006 thriller Deja Vu, the head-spinning plot takes shape as Linda opens the door to a local sheriff who tells her that Jim has been killed in a road accident. But after the harrowing scene where Linda tells her two daughters, she wakes up to find Jim's alive and well and eating breakfast in the kitchen.
Relieved that it's just a dream, this feeling of security swiftly evaporates. A few scenes later Linda wakes up again to find mourners downstairs waiting to attend Jim's funeral. Worse still, her daughter Bridgette (Burness) has received terrible facial scarring and Linda has no idea how.
As the film proceeds and Linda's life alternates between 'before and after' Jim's death, she begins to get a grip on this dual reality. Clues from the 'after' sequences - a dead bird on the ground, a torn 'Yellow Pages', a bottle of lithium in the sink - are eventually clarified as Linda subsequently (in the chronology of the film, at least) pieces her own time-line back together.
Constructing a chart on a piece of paper to help herself (and us) with the structure of events, Linda discovers things about her husband that she didn't like. Notably, there's a chance he has been having an affair with a lush-looking colleague (Valletta). Understandably, Linda begins to think of Jim rather differently in the light of these revelations. She is now aware that she could, if she wishes, let him hurtle towards a fatal accident. "If I let Jim die, is that the same thing as killing him?" she wonders.
Respectable performances by Bullock and McMahon (of 'Nip/Tuck'), prevent it all from becoming too hysterical (or laughable), and for a while Yapo keeps up the pretence that this film is going somewhere, pacing and cutting the film with economy. But by the end the story ties itself up in knots. Obviously, a film where the time-line is bent out of shape defies logic, but Premonition doesn't even adhere to its own rules, as it becomes impossible to figure out what's real and what's not.
Worse still, screenwriter Bill Kelly, who penned the likeable 1999 time-travel comedy Blast From The Past, attempts to add a religious dimension to Linda's quandary, as she visits a priest who tells her, not very helpfully, that "history is full of unexplained phenomenon". In the end, when she pleads to him, "I don't know what to fight for", the only answer that springs to mind is 'a better script'.
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